


Canada Likes It On Top

by busaikko



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Babysitting, Canada, Community: sga_flashfic, Hypothermia, Ice Skating, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-23
Updated: 2008-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-20 23:54:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/218517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/busaikko/pseuds/busaikko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alberta is out to get John; Rodney's trying to keep him around.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Canada Likes It On Top

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: The song in question is The Last Saskatchewan Pirate by The Arrogant Worms (a few words have been changed to implicate the guilty). Also, I've never been to Alberta in the winter, do let me know if I've got anything wrong.

Rodney learned to skate on the pond down the road from his grandparents' house. Jeannie inherited the property when his grandfather finally died, and Rodney tries not to feel resentful. At least it hadn't been liquidized by his father, like so much of Rodney's past. It's a great place for a kid, with the mountains rising just beyond town. It's brimful of nature and fresh air and other (supposedly) healthy things. Wholesome. Jeannie and Kaleb make sure that Madison spends her winter and summer holidays there. She can ski and toboggan, and she's a much better skater than John.

Of course, this is John's first time skating, ever, so Rodney only mentions a few times (maybe ten) that John's getting his ass kicked by a six-year-old.

"How come you keep falling down?" Madison asks, whizzing around and whipping the puck away from John with her (sparkly pink) hockey stick.

John peels himself up from the ice and glares at Rodney.

Rodney _might_ have sold this vacation as a family-bonding activity, centered around wood-burning stoves, steaming mugs of cocoa, and the sharing of body heat under toasty woollen blankets. He _might_ not have mentioned that Jeannie'd asked him (blackmail is such a strong word to use about his baby sister) to babysit for a few days.

And wasn't it John's own fault for not mentioning that he _hated_ being cold? Rodney always thought that John had a very stoic attitude towards climates ( _there's a difference between **stoic** and **happy**_ , John said that morning, pulling on a second pair of trousers over his first). All the exercise is supposed to warm John up, but he doesn't seem very grateful for it. Rodney wonders if Jeannie has any popcorn in her kitchen, for the appeasement of frozen boyfriends.

"He's just old," Rodney says, catching the puck effortlessly and scoring another goal while John's unlocking his knees. "You know, all this victory is really very ego-boosting. Maybe we should see if we can set up a skating rink back. . . home."

"Maybe not," John says, drifting backwards and looking surprised. "Help?"

It's hard not to love a man who's so bulked up with coats, sweaters, trousers, and socks that he's turned into a human air hockey puck, completely at the mercy of the wind coming down the valley. The swirling ice and snow give Jeannie's purple toque, pulled down to John's eyebrows, a Sequin Barbie kind of glamour. John kind of looks like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in drag. Rodney is having a _great_ time.

"Go rescue Uncle John," Rodney says, and Madison zips over. She's color-coordinated in a hot-pink helmet, snowsuit, and skates, a miniature mascot for Pepto-Bismol. She puts out a pink-gloved hand and John grabs hold, and then they're both sliding backwards as if for some unfathomable reason one side of the pond is higher than the other. Madison laughs, a loud belly-laugh that makes John grin and -- gingerly -- start to spin her around.

There are three sudden, sharp cracks, and Rodney drops instinctively, reaching for a gun that isn't there. _Who the hell is shooting at us in Canada?_ he thinks, angry and terrified; and then Madison slams into him, half-sitting and half-lying, as if she's been flung out of harm's way.

 _John, you idiot_ , he thinks, scrambling to his feet, and suddenly it's a lot colder than it was a minute ago. Suddenly the wind that's been making the snow dance in the heatless sunlight isn't poetry at all, it's a wind-chill factor. His head is full of numbers and wild calculations, one long rambling word problem which goes something like this: _How long will it take one skinny, six-foot man to develop hypothermia following submersion in freezing water?_

It's a physics problem, he lectures himself even as he orders Madison to go put on her boots and dig his cell phone out of his backpack. He thinks about Rudolph Clausius and the second law of thermodynamics as he looks at the hole in the ice which John is trying to clamber out of. There's a technique to easing up onto the fragile edge of broken ice and rolling away from the fracture; there is also an ominous countdown to when John's muscles will be so stiff he will be unable to help himself. Rodney can't do much more than to lie flat on the ice and try to slide his hockey stick close enough that John can grab hold. He can't risk falling through the ice himself: Madison needs him, and John needs him, and damn it, this isn't supposed to happen on Earth.

John gets one hip up over the edge of the ice and hangs there a moment. Rodney can see that he's shaking. He thinks about conduction heat loss to the water and convection heat loss to the wind, about how the heat loss increases with the hyperventilation caused by the shock of the cold, and he thinks he really needs to stop thinking about these things and _pull_ , because John's got one hand tight around the hockey stick and who knows how long that grip will last?

Then John kicks himself up and out, breathing as if he'd been running, pushing against the ice with his feet, and letting Rodney guide him to where the ice is strong (and they _tested_ the ice, making sure it was at least half a foot thick in eight different places, because they are manly men who in a babysitting situation prefer dealing with drills to laundry, hands down). As soon as John is on the snow at the edge of the pond, Rodney has the phone from Madison and is calling for an ambulance, while John fights to get off his sodden clothes and skates with hands that are practically useless. (Rodney is torn about this: wet cotton is a terrible, heat-sucking demon, but isn't one of the signs of hypothermia frolicking naked in the cold? He's sure that would scar Madison psychologically for life.)

John struggles out of his undershirt, and Rodney immediately stuffs John's uncooperative arms into his own sweater and coat, because he is a rugged Canadian who can stand around for hours if not minutes in just his t-shirt, and because John's chest hair is freezing into stiff little hairsicles. John grumbles about the ambulance and the fussing and tries to give Rodney's coat back, sounding like a belligerent drunk. This is wrong, wrong, wrong: Rodney's father was a belligerent drunk (not _violent_ , but incredibly sarcastic), and in Rodney's limited experience John is supposed to be very mellow when drunk, prone to hiccups and spontaneous napping.

"You're scaring Madison," he says, having to almost push John bodily up the hill to the bend. Madison is carrying his backpack; they've left their skates and God knows what else down by the pond. The ambulance has just arrived, as well as the police, who are heading down to rope off the ice and post WARNINGS as the ambulance doors shut and the siren wails.

* * *

They finally make it back home at half past six. Rodney nests Madison and John under eight million blankets on the sofa, sticking a random cartoon about empowered female characters in the VCR while he heats up a can of soup for supper. They eat in front of the television. Madison sings along with the hideous earworm theme song ( _every step I take takes me closer to my dreams, flying rockets! mapping genes!_ ); John lists against the sofa arm. Rodney hops up every thirty seconds or so, for napkins or spoons or cups of warm milk or toast. Normally, John would put a stop to the fidgets, but John just. . . lists.

Rodney takes out the woollens box and hands John another toque, this one green.

While John was being checked over in the hospital, Rodney and Madison went to the tourist trap down the road to buy him new clothes. He looks like he's had a makeover by Six-year-old Eye for the Queer Guy: stiff new jeans that flare oddly over his new green socks, a heavyweight purple jersey that reads _Somebody in Canada ♥s Me_ , and a hooded pullover with _CANADA LIKES IT ON TOP_ written over a map. John takes the hat, and for a moment Rodney doesn't know whether he's gone that one step too far. But then John pulls it down to his ears, flips the hood up over, and kicks Rodney in the knee.

"Ow," Rodney says, and John struggles up out of the blankets with Madison giggling and struggling where she's trapped under his arm.

"Bedtime," John says firmly. The next thirty minutes are spent in Madison's comfortable unchanging routine of brushing teeth and changing into pyjamas and wheedling for _just one more story, please_? Somehow John's managed to hide all the clocks from her, and she's sound asleep and drooling long before eight o'clock, which is half a miracle and half a promise of an obscenely early wake-up time.

John doesn't strip for bed, just fumbles the light off and then burrows down under the blankets that Rodney's hauled back upstairs. Rodney shoves in beside him, not even bothering to pretend that he's sleeping on the sofa tonight, and settles one hand on John's back, rubbing firm round strokes. He likes how John feels: solid. Breathing.

"You warm?" he asks.

There's an awkward pause, like a satellite delay, or the lag in a simultaneous translation where the two grammars fail to agree. It's not that John wants to lie to him -- Rodney sometimes thinks that John believes _himself_ when he says it's fine, I'm cool, and (recently, no thanks to the new Kiwi engineer) no worries. He remembers the one time his father's doctor forced him to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. He'd refused, when his turn had come, to admit the bit about _being_ an alcoholic.

Sometimes, recognising the truth is a terribly courageous thing to do.

"I'm _getting_ warm," John says cautiously, and Rodney _hmm_ s as if his concern is negligible. Perversely encouraged by this, John goes on: "I know that I _am_ warm, I just don't feel warm. Like the cold's inside me. But it's always kind of like that." He shifts, setting his head against Rodney's shoulder, still wearing the hood and hat.

"Maybe you're just a skinny southerner with thin blood," Rodney says.

"I can't believe you _bought_ this," John says, picking at the sweatshirt. "I can't believe I'm wearing it. Jesus." He shifts one hip under and settles, and then re-settles, and Rodney thinks, oh, wonderful, it's going to be one of those kinetic nights. "Jeannie'll be calling in the morning," John says, muffled, as his face is currently somewhere under Rodney's elbow. "And you're going to say, Hey there, how's it going, we're all fine, even though John took a dive in the pond, nah, 's fine, Madison's fine just a little shook up, here, lemme put her on, she's a real trooper."

"I don't think that's what I'll say," Rodney says. "I have never in my life called anyone _a real trooper_."

"First time for everything," John says, and after a moment he makes the little kicked-puppy sound that means he's fallen asleep.

In the hospital, as he'd been dressing John with a brusqueness that came from sheer infuriated terror, John'd reached up with his cold hands that still weren't moving right and framed Rodney's face, kissing him slow, all wind-chapped lips and hot breath, _alive, alive, alive_.

He was completely blindsided by how much he wanted to be reassured like that (the first time John's ever reached for him in need, speaking of first times), and by how wrong it felt. _Behind closed doors_ is such an integral part of who they are, together, that even touching where they can be seen feels dangerous. He worries about what Madison might let slip -- the SGC does send people to Jeannie far more often than he likes. He worries that the nurse who smirks as if they're _cute_ might make some comment if anyone calls to follow up on John's paperwork. He worries about the stupid sweatshirt, what it means that he let Madison talk him into buying the damn thing and what it means that John's wearing it. He worries that when John folds the sweatshirt into a box to be shoved into the crawlspace for some theoretical _next time_ (it would be impossible to take to Atlantis, he knows that, John knows that), that he'll feel compelled to find some other way to -- to stake his claim.

He lies awake in the dark for far too long, a combination of the too-early bedtime and the too-many cups of bad waiting-room coffee making his mind go around like a hamster on a wheel. When he does sleep, it's the annoying kind of sleep where he feels as if he's awake, not restful in the least.

He wakes up because he feels like he's falling, and his arms fly out instinctively. It's a lousy way to wake up, and the fact that he's alone makes him feel worse. He grumbles to himself as he dresses, and knows he's in bad shape when the sight of a solitary pair of wool socks in the top drawer nearly sends him into a panic attack.

"I will not lose it," he tells the mirror sternly as he shaves. "I have faced down Wraith. I have saved _galaxies_. I refuse to have a mental breakdown in Alberta." He glares right into his own blue eyes. "Nana and Grandbob would never forgive you. Meredith."

Going down the stairs, he can hear a ruckus in the kitchen that sounds -- at a wild guess -- like Madison beating out a rhythm with spoons on a pot and John (God save them all) singing. Rodney goes into stealth mode, hoping to catch one or both of them doing something extremely embarrassing. Fortunately, the far corner of the dining room is perfect for spying on the kitchen.

John's apparently dressed like a pirate. He's wearing the dreadful green toque again, but there's a feather in it, and he's got a scarf tied around his hips to hold his wooden spoon-cum-cutlass. That ought to have an embarrassment factor of at least five, Rodney thinks, smirking. John's also singing Madison's favorite pirate song, which goes something like:

 _heave-ho, high-ho_ (Madison accompanies by dinging the hell out of the Farberware) _coming down the Plains  
Stealing wheat and barley and all the other grains  
And it's a ho-hey, high-hey_ (Madison sings this as ho-ho-ho, and Rodney wonders if she thinks Santa is into piracy)  
 _farmers bar your doors  
When you see the Jolly Roger on Regina's mighty shores_

"Avast," Rodney says, walking in, and John doesn't look much surprised at all.

"We were just pillaging some breakfast," John says, and waves at the table, which is set with bowls of oatmeal, raisins turning each one into a smiley face. "Coffee?"

Rodney wants to take John's temperature, make him wear more socks (even if he has to go _buy_ more socks), bundle John up, send him back to bed. He still looks cold: there are three or four collars peeking out from under the Canada Likes It On Top sweatshirt. Not to mention the pirate gear. John's moving a little stiffly; he looks pale.

Instead, he says, "Please," and inhales half the coffee before he's sitting down. John helps Madison drown her cereal with milk. She doesn't stop talking even to eat, bits of oatmeal and raisins going every which way. It's horrible and disgusting, and John nearly spits out his own oatmeal when Rodney says so, but refuses to explain what the joke is.

The phone rings while Rodney's stacking dishes for washing, and John's head comes up. He looks quite inappropriately _naughty_.

"You are such a -- " Rodney says, and cuts his eyes to Madison with a significant raise of his eyebrows, thus allowing John to fill in his own insult and preventing Madison's vocabulary from acquiring a new word that would have Jeannie yelling at him.

Jeannie, yeah, he thinks, shoving up from the table, grabbing the cordless and walking around the kitchen just because he can.

He tells her the whole sad story, and somehow overnight it's become almost funny. Five years from now, ten years, if they are still alive, they'll sit around and laugh about John Sheppard's spectacular failure at ice skating. Jeannie fusses and worries, and he brushes her concerns off as if he hadn't thought the same things ( _shock, drowning, cardiac arrest, stopped breathing_ ).

"John's fine," he says. "He's a tough nut -- a real trooper."

And John laughs down into his coffee as Jeannie tells Rodney to give John her love, and he says, "Of course," and Jeannie says, "We know, you know, Meredith."

"Know what," he says, and John is obviously eavesdropping. "Didn't you call to talk to your daughter?" he says, and hands the phone to Madison, who of course says first off that she likes Uncle Rodney, he doesn't make her take a bath _or_ brush her hair.

"Aww, man," John says. "I knew we'd screw this up."

"I blame you." Rodney looks at the tangled birds-nest that his niece's hair has become, and at John, probably still cold but unlikely to mention it, and probably knowing what Rodney knows and Jeannie knows, but not going to mention that either. Which might be a good thing -- the knowing -- who knows?

John considers his culpability for a long moment, very seriously, and then shrugs. "Okay." And he reaches out to touch Rodney's hand, like it's something he does all the time, while Madison chatters on.

Well, the pirate life's appealing but you don't just find it here  
I hear in north Alberta there's a band of buccaneers  
They roam the Athabasca, Miller, Sheppard, and McKay,  
Looking for the Spanish Main but Sheppard lost the way.


End file.
